StarCon 2018
who it's for
software engineers, security engineers, front-end developers, open source contributors, site reliability engineers, engineering managers
topics
ransomware binary analysis techniques; CRDT-based real-time collaboration; Docker network namespace tracing; formal methods with Z3 and KLEE; CSS architectures and design systems; software-defined radio fundamentals; Rust advanced type systems; timing-attack mitigation for cryptography; lossless data compression techniques; remote code execution in editors; assembly-ish actor teaching language
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynotes 'So you want to be a wizard?' | Julia Evans | 39m |
Claims that asking dumb questions is a superpower and shows concrete methods: reads source code to find mystery strings, runs experiments like 100 Python… | ||
| Open Lessons from Open Source | Safia Abdalla | 22m |
Begins with a three‑day effort to submit a two‑character fix to pandas that gets merged, then moves into sustained work on Jupiter and the temp and B… | ||
| The Innerworkings of Ransomware | Dinah Davis | 19m |
Explains how Locky and WannaCry actually operate: binaries copy themselves to temp, delete shadow copies, set startup registry entries and fetch keys from a… | ||
| Concurrent, Assembly-ish Actor-based Programming for Teens | Josh Bowman-Matthews | 14m |
Robotic is an assembly‑ish language inside MegaZeux that proves surprising specific choices work: no heap or stack all state via globals and game objects… | ||
| Why You Should be Building Design Systems and CSS Architectures | Christina Truong | 15m |
Argues that starting with a CSS architecture and a live design system prevents later churn, showing a built Women in Tech site made from copy‑paste modular… | ||
| Formal Methods for Everyone: Practical Tools for Computer-Aided Reasoning | Murphy Berzish | 21m |
Concrete outcomes: Z3 SMT solver is used (Python, C/C++, Java bindings) to decide satisfiability over integers, strings, bitvectors and floating point and to… | ||
| Of Tracked Changes and Diffs: Moving from Editorial to Engineering | Breanne Boland | 15m |
More than a decade in online content leads to one concrete claim: editorial habits make code review faster and less fraught. Describes actual practices —… | ||
| Notworking with a Whale: A Tale of Dockers, Networks, and Problem Solving | Fatema Boxwala | 13m |
Goal is to trace a host port back to the host process ID for a service running in a Docker container, and the story is about what actually works. Shows failed… | ||
| How to make a real-time collaborative text editor in 5 easy steps! | Rudi Chen | 13m |
Claim: build a real-time collaborative text editor by making operations commute and be idempotent. Uses CRDTs not OT, models text as a bag of characters with… | ||
| Why I Prefer Good Testing Over Excellent Testing | Tina Fletcher | 15m |
Stories name the failure modes and the fixes: a monitoring user skewed the usage report, an actual port that was closed in one datacenter, an S3 outage breaks… | ||
| Dealing with Bad Architecture Decisions: A Case Study | Claire Janke | 15m |
Team builds an Elasticsearch-backed order index but discovers one minute update lag because drift takes up to a minute (sometimes 15+) to push changes into a… | ||
| How giant human-powered calculators became the internet | Andrew Louis | 18m |
Three origin stories anchor specific claims: Vannevar Bush proposes the Memex never built as a conceptual hyperlinking device; Douglas Engelbart proves those… | ||
| Taking the Fun Out of Everything: Automating Neopets | Kelly McBride | 13m |
Scripts automate dailies and bank interest by making HTTP requests, using neo live and Python to log actions and replay them. A concrete trading rule is… | ||
| Protecting cryptography code from timing vulnerabilities | Tim McLean | 14m |
Shows a concrete string-compare leak exploited by measuring tiny timing differences across many requests and even from co‑resident EC2 VMs, demonstrates… | ||
| Undoing the Chatbot | Erika Pierre | 11m |
Built a working chatbot that runs largely in the browser using SpeechRecognition/SpeechSynthesis Web APIs and a tiny Express backend, implemented in plain… | ||
| Introduction to Software Defined Radios | Jordan Pryde | 13m |
A practical primer: get an RTL‑SDR (~$30, 25–1750 MHz, receive‑only), use a waterfall/spectrum analyzer to find signals, buy an antenna or upconverter for… | ||
| Why Lossless Data Compression Is Important and Fun | Alex Rhatushnyak | 18m |
Claims that lossless compression wins real money and cites win cash in compression competitions and practical tips: find fast simple transforms that boost… | ||
| Gloom, Doom, and the Internet | Keefer Rourke | 14m |
Argument claims the web leaks rich identifiers in HTTP headers, cites Panopticlick style tests that make a Chromium install uniquely identifiable out of over a… | ||
| Managing Connections with Graphs: Uses and Challenges | Siddhartha Sahu | 13m |
Graphs reduce Euler’s seven-bridges puzzle to vertex degrees and prove no walk exists when four vertices have odd degree, showing concrete math behind the… | ||
| Imagining a world with Ethereum | Anastasia Santasheva | 16m |
Compares Bitcoin’s ledger to Ethereum Virtual Machine programs and explains that ether buys gas to run solidity contracts; shows a live DApp example… | ||
| How Rust Makes Advanced Type Systems Accessible to the Masses | Sunjay Varma | 12m |
Rust claims compile-time guarantees of memory safety and absence of data races, using a borrow-and-ownership type discipline that rejects unsafe programs… | ||
| Remote code execution in your text editor! | Max Veystman | 14m |
A vulnerability in the Vim Elixir plugin alchemist.vim lets an editor-run server evaluate strings from sockets and read and run local .exs files; a crafted… | ||
| nothing matches | ||